140 TRANSACTIONS OF ROVAL SCOTTISH ARBORICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



It is perhaps not a matter of common knowledge that the old 

 Highland forests, in certain Scottish districts, were entirely 

 depleted in the latter half of the eighteenth and beginning of 

 the nineteenth centuries, in the manufacture of pig iron. The 

 Carron Iron Works, to begin with, depended solely on native 

 timber for smelting the ore. Coal and coke were not then 

 supposed to be suitable for this. There were large furnaces also in 

 Ayrshire, the iron being brought there from Furness, in England, 

 simply because of the great quantity of timber available; and 

 these furnaces were worked for over a hundred years, till the 

 whole timber in the district was exhausted. In our own 

 immediate neighbourhood, namely, in Aberdeenshire and Kin- 

 cardineshire, the supply is very far from equal to the demand. 

 It is an easy matter to point out the estates, within fifty miles of 

 Aberdeen, where any great acreage of woodland still exists. 

 Commencing with Deeside, we have Durris, Crathes, Glen Dye, 

 Ballogie, Finzean, Craigievar, and the fine old woods of Glen 

 Tana, Abergeldie, Invercauld, Mar Lodge and Balmoral ; but 

 it is doubtful whether some of these can be taken into account, as 

 on several of the estates there is every probability of the timber 

 never being sold. On Donside and vicinity there are the 

 Fetternear and Cluny Woods, and the woods of Strathdon ; while 

 on the north-western portion of our county we have the famous 

 Binnhill, at Huntly ; and we have still some fine old wood 

 belonging to the Dukes of Fife and Richmond and Gordon, in 

 Morayshire ; while on the Seafield estates there are some 30,000 

 acres of wood, of which about 20,000 acres, however, have been 

 planted during the last forty-five years, on ground whose former 

 value was eightpence per acre. 



What is left of our home timber is getting further and further 

 away from our only means of transit. At the present moment, 

 I know of several lots of wood being cut from twenty to 

 twenty-five miles from the nearest railway station. As regards 

 re-planting, too little is being done by the proprietors. In a few 

 isolated cases natural seedlings are springing up, but one may 

 travel for miles over ground that was bearing marketable timber 

 thirty years ago, and not find a single tree on it now. At 

 Tominourd, near Cromdale, there is an exceptionally thriving 

 crop of natural larch, and on the Curr Hill, Abernethy, both on 

 the Seafield estates, a splendid example of 250 acres, composed 

 of firs and larches of thirty years' growth. The results obtained 



